'keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers' would probably have 'no
difficulty,' if once satisfied that the author they were seeking after
was _not_ Shakespeare, in finding as a fact that he _was_ Bacon. But
suppose James Spedding had been on that jury, and, rising in his
place, had spoken as follows:

'My Lord,--If any man has ever studied the writings of Bacon, I
have. For twenty-five years I have done little else. If any man is
keenly alive to his marvellous mental powers, I am that man. I am
also deeply read in the plays attributed to Shakespeare, and I
think I am in a condition to say that, whoever was the real author,
it was _not_ Bacon.'

That this is exactly what Spedding would have said we know from the
letter he wrote on the subject to Mr. Holmes, reprinted in _Essays
and Discussions_, and it completely upsets the whole scheme of
arrangement of Lord Penzance's summing-up, which proceeds on the easy
footing that the more difficulties you throw in Shakespeare's path the
smoother becomes Bacon's.

That there are difficulties in Shakespeare's path, some things very
hard to explain, must be admitted. Lord Penzance makes the most of
these. It is, indeed, a most extraordinary thing that anybody should
have had the mother-wit to write the plays traditionally assigned to
Shakespeare. Where did he get it from? How on earth did the plays get
themselves written? Where, when, and how did the author pick up his
multifarious learnings? Lord Penzance, good, honest man, is simply
staggered by the extent of the play-wright's information. The plays,
so he says, 'teem with erudition,' and can only have been written by
someone who had the classics at his finger-ends, modern languages on